Hasta La Gadget!

Developing for the new Windows 8 platform won't be anything like developers' past experiences, according to Microsoft. (Photo courtesy Ars Technica)

By Peter Bright, Ars Technica

When Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 8 a week ago, the reaction from most circles was positive. The new Windows 8 user interface looks clean, attractive and thoughtful. And, in a first for a Microsoft desktop operating system, it’s finger-friendly. But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: They were told that all their experience, all their knowledge and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8.

Key to the new Windows 8 look and feel, and instrumental to Microsoft’s bid to make Windows a viable tablet operating system, are new-style full-screen “immersive” applications. Windows 8 will include new APIs for developing these applications, and here is where the problem lies. Having new APIs isn’t itself a concern — there’s simply never been anything like this on Windows before, so obviously the existing Windows APIs won’t do the job — but what troubles many developers is the way that Microsoft has said these APIs will be used. Three minutes and 45 seconds into a demo video, Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green, in charge of the Windows Experience, briefly describes a new immersive weather application and says, specifically, that the application uses “our new developer platform, which is, uhh, it’s based on HTML5 and JavaScript.”

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Windows developers have invested a lot of time, effort and money into the platform. Over the years, they’ve learned Win32, COM, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight and WPF. All of these technologies were, at one time or another, instrumental in creating desktop applications on Windows. With the exception of Visual Basic 6, all of them are still more or less supported on Windows today, and none of them can do it all; all except Visual Basic 6 and WinForms have a role to play in modern Windows development.

Hearing that Windows 8 would use HTML5 and JavaScript for its new immersive applications was, therefore, more than a little disturbing to Windows developers. Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise in Windows development and countless hours spent learning Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest technology. Perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools.

A Justified Reaction

The idea of Microsoft discarding all of that expertise seems crazy, and one might think that the developer response is an overreaction — but it’s seen as confirmation of the direction Microsoft already appears to be heading down: moving HTML5 to the foreground, in spite of its inferiority to other technology. The Windows 8 comment made by Larson-Green was shocking, yes, but seemed to be confirmation of what developers already suspected. Developers aren’t willing to assume that the company is going to do right by them, because the messages from the company have given them every reason to believe that the Larson-Green really meant what she said: If you want to use the new development platform, you’re going to have to use HTML5 and JavaScript.

The company has never exactly been good at picking a direction for its development strategy and sticking with it. There’s been too much infighting, too many leaps aboard new technology bandwagons, and too much software that fails to adopt new paradigms. But until about a year and a half ago, it looked like things were beginning to settle down, with the combination of .NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and WPF’s Flash-like sibling, Silverlight. WPF and .NET provide a flexible, high-level and structured approach for writing GUI applications, and Silverlight is a cut-down version of WPF that can be used as a browser plugin on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Neither of these technologies was perfect — WPF has never been as fast as it should be, and Silverlight is not as cross-platform as it ought to be — but the set of products did at least represent some kind of a coherent vision for software development. WPF and .NET for big applications, Silverlight for portable ones.

Microsoft asked us to drop by at E3 to chat up a generically identified “Xbox executive,” imagine our surprise when we found Kudo Tsunoda hiding behind door number six. Wearing his signature shades, Kudo gave us a brief primer on what makes Kinect great, or at least a heavy endorsement of Kinect Fun Labs. While we can certainly dig the bit-sized gadgetry Fun Labs has to offer, we like to dig deeper — will the Kinect hardware ever be integrated into other devices? Any plans for Microsoft’s 3D tracking camera and Windows 8? Kudo did his best to feed our ravenous appetite for answers.

It wasn’t easy on poor Kudo, of course — more than once we saw him glance longingly at his wrangler, a friendly PR rep keeping him from spilling the beans on anything too awesome. Probing about Windows 8 and Kinect produced one such look, and while our man very lightly suggested that Microsoft does more than games — and that the dual-camera device might start showing up on other devices — the big M had nothing to announce at that time. Kudo did go on to say, however, that we can expect to see new, innovative, “oh my gosh, I can’t believe Kinect can do that” experiences at E3 year after year, citing this year’s keynote for some recent examples. While we couldn’t coax any leaks about Xbox or Kinect successors out of the man, it’s good to see Microsoft’s continued dedication to improving the platform.

Kudo Tsunoda doesn’t tell us a thing about Windows 8 support for Kinect originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s little doubt that the launch of Windows 8 will bring with it a wave of new tablet devices from all sorts of manufacturers and vendors. But did any of us expect to see one bearing Microsoft’s own logo? According to DigiTimes’ sometimes accurate, sometimes shaky upstream supplier sources, Steve Ballmer’s team is looking into putting together an own-brand Windows 8 slate, which will be powered by Texas Instruments silicon and put together by Taiwan-based ODMs. The deadline for this device is said to be by the end of 2012 and TI’s involvement suggests it’d be one of those newfangled ARM-based Windows machines, but beyond that, we’ve little more to go on. Whatever the outcome, don’t expect Microsoft to go overboard, DigiTimes says the company is “proceeding on a low profile.”

Microsoft eyeing own-brand Windows 8 tablet for end of 2012? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Jun 2011 08:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010 shares his vision for the company: Windows will run everywhere.  Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Microsoft has shown an early look at Windows 8. The upcoming OS is designed to run on any machine, from a tablet to a desktop PC, and that’s going to be a problem. While Windows 8 has some genuinely clever features, it is at heart yet another skinned version of regular old Windows.

Below is a video of it in action. Skip to a minute in, if you don’t care to hear about how tired the poor Windows 8 team is after so much work.

On the surface, Windows 8 looks pretty. The tile-based touch interface makes the iPad look old and dusty. The live info that can be seen at a glance, and the fast switching between apps are very slick. So is the split view, which lets you drag a second app in from the side and — after a pause — the existing app shifts over and makes space. Thus you can run two apps concurrently, which is enough to get most multitasking tasks done.

I’m also impressed by the thumb keyboard, an option which splits the QWERTY keyboard into two parts and shrinks them into the corners of the screen. I wish for this every time I use my iPad while standing up.

But under the hood, this is, like every other tablet-friendly version of Windows, a skin over a desktop OS. The fancy new “Windows 8 apps” are written in HTML5 and JavaScript, but you can also run regular ol’ Windows apps like Excel and Word. You even have access to Explorer and the full file system.

The issue? Microsoft is clinging on to its old PC legacy, which won’t help Windows 8 succeed as a tablet — for the same reasons we said Windows 7 wouldn’t be good for slates.  It will carry with it the baggage of the Windows PC legacy: vulnerability viruses, the need to install drivers, and apps that aren’t optimized for tablets. These were all issues that the iPad eliminated to make it better than traditional computers in a few key areas.

Given that developers can just run their existing apps in normal Windows mode, where will the incentive be to make amazing touch-only versions of applications, like the truly excellent Omni Outliner or GarageBand for the iPad? What we’ll get are a thousand Twitter widgets, turning the innovative tile skin into something akin to OS X’s Dashboard.

This also brings the disk-gobbling size of a desktop OS, along with the complications of running Windows (malware and the general weirdness of any desktop OS) and of course, the battery life of a desktop OS.

That’s fine. Many people want a full-featured computer in tablet form.

But remember that the iPad is selling in the millions precisely because it is simple, lacks a complicated file system and the like, and doesn’t require a nerd to keep it humming along.

People who want all that already have a choice. It’s called a laptop.

Microsoft is almost there, but it needs to lose its obsession with putting Windows on everything. Take this cool, tile-based OS and put it on a tablet, sure. But leave the mouse-based, legacy desktop OS out of it. And for God’s sake, don’t call it Windows.

Previewing Windows 8 [Microsoft]

See Also:

• WindPad: $500 Windows 7 Tablet Arrives September
• Windows Phone 7 Series Tablet Concept
• 7 Reasons You Won’t Want a Windows 7 Slate
• It’s Not Easy to Make a Tablet, Stantum Slate PC Proves

Continue reading Qualcomm announces dual- and quad-core Snapdragon processor support for Windows 8

Qualcomm announces dual- and quad-core Snapdragon processor support for Windows 8 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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